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Published: 4 February 2010
By DAN CARRIER

APPARENTLY Nelson Mandela was playing with friends that game where you ask each other who you would like to represent yourself in the bio-pic of your life. He said he’d like Morgan Freeman to take on the role (according to Morgan Freeman, that is).
And on the strength of this film, which tells the story of how South Africa’s 1995 rugby team helped heal the scars of Apartheid, Mandela made a wise choice. Freeman is a fine actor, and taking on the role of one of the most revered and recognisable people of our age is no small job. But he does it with dignity, and ensures this is not a caricature of the statesman. 
Invictus, named after a Victorian poem that Mandela found inspiring  while imprisoned on Robben Island, tells the story of a country struggling to come to terms with its past, with a future facing terrible political problems.
Mandela hits on the idea that the Afrikaaner-dominated rugby team should become a symbol of the newly liberated Rainbow Nation, and throws his immense powers of motivation behind them.
We watch as Mandela and the captain Francois Pienaar (played believably by a blonde Matt Damon) fight to persuade the country that supporting this team together is a symbol of how great South Africa could become.
Running alongside the main story is a clever aside on how Mandela’s new black security team had to work with the government’s special branch. During the Apartheid era, the special branch were feared for their extra-judicial behaviour, hoiking people off the streets. Now Mandela’s trusted ANC hard men are stuck in a tiny office with their white counterparts (it makes for some intentionally funny scenes). Their gradual understanding of each other and the earning of trust is a metaphor for what happens to the nation as a whole as the rugby team makes its way through the various rounds of the World Cup.
This will not be everyone’s cup of tea. It is pretty cheesy in places – although I have to admit, the bits when Freeman is doing Mandela at his statesman-like best choked me up. But then show me a sports film that isn’t cheesy. 
And while this may on the surface be about how sport can unite a nation, it is actually much more than this. It explains how the Truth and Reconciliation Committee worked. Mandela and the judges appointed to draw up a new constitution had a massive problem on their hands – namely, they wanted the perpetrators of the outrageous acts of the Apartheid regime to come clean about their behaviour and their crimes. 
It meant placing them on the stand to tell about the government-sponsored terror they committed, about the torture, the murders. 
In return they would be immune from prosecution. 
“Reconciliation starts here,” proclaims Freeman as Mandela. “Forgiveness liberates the soul. We have to surprise them with compassion, restraint and generosity.”
Mandela knew this was a lot to ask, but believed it was the only way to start afresh. He would say it would mean the victims’ families, desperate for information, would finally know the truth. It would mean the perpetrators could say sorry, their crimes made public and perhaps forgiven. 
This was a hard project to sell to a nation that still needed healing, and when Mandela heard the country’s Sports Council had voted unanimously to  change the nation’s rugby team’s name from the Springboks and scrap the gold and yellow jerseys that to so many represented Afrikaaners, Mandela stepped in. He saw that rugby was simply a game and therefore in the grand scheme of things did not matter, but would be taken as a sign by white people that the new nation had no place for them. 
And he also saw that using something as frivolous as a World Cup tournament to heal the scars that were still raw across the nation was a chance he simply could not miss. His mission was sold to Pienaar – and the pair set about winning the tournament for the united South Africa, as this film carefully testifies.